Anne L. Hendrixson

Anne L. Hendrixson

Director, Population and Development Programs

Critical Social Inquiry

alhCLPP@hampshire.edu

Mail Code SS

Anne Hendrixson

Franklin Patterson Hall G-17

413.559.5506

Anne Hendrixson earned her M.A. in international development and social change from Clark University. Anne was PopDev coordinator (from 1996-2000), and returned to the program as assistant director in 2012. Before coming back to PopDev, she served as the assistant director for aids2031, a project commission of UNAIDS to chart a long-term, global response to HIV and also started up several new initiatives for the NCIIA, an educational non-profit.

Anne’s interests include taking on policy directed at young populations, promoting fresh thinking around the links between population and the environment, supporting transformative integrations of reproductive health and HIV/AIDS approaches for all people, and working for contraceptive safety and access.

Her recent publications include, “Beyond Bonus or Bomb: Upholding the Sexual and Reproductive Health for Young People” in Reproductive Health Matters 2014;22(43).

Recent and Upcoming Courses

This course is a critical introduction to international development history and theory, through the lens of population, or "overpopulation." "Overpopulation" has been seen as a fundamental impediment to nations' economic and social development and a global environmental and security crisis requiring an emergency response on an international scale. We will upend this account of population drawing from feminist and critical race theorists, as well as global South perspectives on development. We will explore notions of environmental sustainability, gender and empowerment, race and threat in international development theory. We will look at the history of population control and trace the international shift toward sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR). We will examine current issues in SRHR alongside on-going population control abuses, including forced sterilization and mass dissemination of long-acting contraceptives. We will also investigate how current population dynamics, including divergent age distribution in the global North and South as well as increased migration, influence development in the era of climate change.

Populationism refers to "ideologies that attribute social and ecological ills to human numbers" (Butler and Angus 2011, xxi). In this class, we will examine three dimensions of populationism: demo-, geo- and bio. Demopopulationism refers to knowledges, practices and policies that blame human numbers for global problems in order to rationalize efforts to reduce population growth and "optimize" population composition along the lines of race and class. We will look at past and contemporary population control efforts targeted at poor, cisgendered women of color in the global South and the US. Geopopulationism describes racialized, socio-spatial segregation including the strengthening of borders, detainment, and climate change adaptation strategies that involve dispossession, displacement, and discriminatory redistribution of land and natural resources. We will examine a range of geopopulationist projects, which could include mass incarceration in the US; strategic use of the concept of "climate" refugees to justify building borders; and land and water seizure by private corporations and government developers that forces population displacement. Biopopulationism refers to the commodification of bodies and lifestyles that value some lives over others. As examples, we will explore issues like pharmaceutical testing on bodies in parts of the global South to benefit consumers seated primarily in the global North, as well as issues of unequal reproduction, like international surrogacy.

Population, or "overpopulation," has long been blamed as a primary reason for environmental problems, including climate change. In this class, we will critically examine the gendered and racialized ways that environmental thinkers have framed population in relation to resource scarcity, food insecurity, conflict and violence, environmental degradation and climate change. Starting from the 1948 bestsellers Our Plundered Planet and Road to Survival we will analyze environmental discourses that call for population reduction to address environmental issues. We will explore how these discourses influence environmental activism, impact sexual and reproductive health policy, and fuel anti-immigrant rhetoric, while obscuring the complex contributors to environmental problems. In the class, we will look to reproductive, environmental and climate justice movements to find frameworks that take action on environmental issues while fighting for social justice.

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